Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  “Depends on the question,” she says, and my mind just—stutters. If she’s thinking about work right now, then it’s 100 percent fact that Kit has scrambled my sex radar forever, because there’s something about the way she’s looking at me, something about the way her voice has pitched a little bit lower. I feel like I’m about five minutes away from fucking her on this table, three minutes from getting under that tank top.

  I stare right back at her. I watch as a pink flush creeps onto her pale cheeks, right under where the edge of her glasses rest. But Kit—despite the tears before, despite the fact that she’s had a lousy go of it today—Kit is tough as hell, and if she means the way she’s looking at me right now, she’s not going to back down.

  I set down my phone and stand from my chair. She tips her head back to follow my movements, to look up at me from where she sits, arms still crossed, eyes still challenging.

  “I’m asking,” I say, once I’m standing right in front of her, and she likes that. The right side of her mouth quirks up in a half smile.

  “Well,” she says, reaching up to slip off her glasses, setting them on the buffet that’s behind her. “I’m answering.”

  I’m on her so fast, lifting her out of her chair to set her ass up on the table, and she instantly spreads her legs to let me step between them, and it’s this hot, unbearable pause where our faces are inches apart, where I know we’re both thinking about how easy that was, how quickly we got to a place where my crotch is pressed against hers. But then I’m kissing her, my hands coming up to cradle her jaw, to tip her face just so, and holy shit, kissing Kit is hot, and sweet, and the way she opens her mouth against mine and slides her tongue across my bottom lip—I’ve got to stop myself from clenching my hands, from grabbing fistfuls of her hair to bring her closer to me. She’s got her hands on my stomach, stroking up and down, and when I feel her grab the fabric in her fingers, tugging, I moan, knowing she feels the same way I do, that desperation to get closer. I want these clothes off, want to feel her skin against mine, and I let my hands trail from her neck down her arms, thinking of how I can get this top off her without taking my mouth from hers.

  There’s a soft knocking, and I think—shit, this table, because it’s old, and despite my earlier fantasy, it’s probably not a good idea for me to fuck her on it. But—no, it’s not the table, because then the doorbell rings, and Kit stiffens and pulls away, her busy hands coming to rest right at my waistband, and I think if that fucking antique doorbell weren’t so loud, you could probably hear my dick calling out, lower! Just a little lower!

  “I—uh. I should get that,” she says, but she winces when she looks down, sees the bulge in my jeans. “God. I’m so, so sorry.”

  I can’t even form words at the moment. All my higher-order thinking skills have relocated to my balls. I step back from her and she scrambles off the table, snagging her glasses. Her hair is a mess from my hands in it, plus she’s still got a few pieces of plaster stuck there in the back, and maybe I got one over on that tank top after all, because it’s twisted and bunched up a little, and she straightens it as she walks to the front door.

  Once she’s out of sight, I turn back toward the table, discreetly adjust myself so that whoever comes in doesn’t get sexually harassed just by my existence. Holy hell, I need a cold shower. I settle for another drink of water, a rough pass of my hand through my hair. I don’t think I’ve ever been so turned on in my life from a single kiss.

  “Greer is here!” Kit says from behind me, and her voice is so transparently, falsely cheerful that I feel better, more at ease knowing she’s as thrown off as I am.

  “Hi,” says Greer, in that small, sweet voice she has. Greer is no dummy—she knows she’s walked into something, and so I make even more of an effort to control my expression, to pretend I’m not going home with the worst case of blue balls I’ve had since eleventh grade.

  “Hey, Greer. How’s school?”

  Kit gives me a grateful smile, and it’s hard not to feel proud whenever I get even a scrap of approval from her.

  “Oh—it’s okay. It’s good. We just started an entrepreneurship unit in my business class,” she says. “That’s kind of your thing, right?”

  “Kind of,” I say. Greer is holding her purse in one hand and a few DVDs in the other, and even though I’m doing my best, it’s awkward in here. I get the sense that dining room table has something to say. I turn back to it, grab my phone and keys and tuck them into my pockets. “I should go,” I tell them, but I’m looking at Kit, and she’s flushed and fidgeting. If she asks me to stay, if she makes any move to suggest that she wants me to hang around, even if it’s with her and Greer, even if I’m spending my evening sitting on her couch and watching—I think that’s a copy of Predator, which is unexpected—I’ll stay.

  But she seems cautious, and I don’t want to press her. “I’ll make some calls about upstairs,” I tell her.

  “Thank you. Really.”

  I can sense that Greer is looking back and forth between us, but she too seems locked in place. I hate the heavy, frozen feeling in the room, and I have to do something.

  So I do what feels, weirdly, like the most natural thing. I step forward, setting my hand on Kit’s upper arm, where her skin is bare and warm, and I lean down to press a firm kiss on her mouth, a quick, intimate touch, as if I’ve done it a million times, as if this woman didn’t just give me the best first kiss I’ve ever had. “I’ll call you,” I say, right against her mouth, then set another quick kiss there.

  And then I’m headed toward the front door, calling out a quick goodbye to Greer. I barely hear the way she squeaks out a surprised “‘Bye!” before I’m on the porch, already wondering when I’ll see Kit again.

  Chapter 13

  Kit

  Monday morning, and no call from Ben, not that I’m waiting around or anything. Not that I kept my ringer on high all day yesterday. Not that I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily Ben put me on that table, about how hard and strong he was all over, about how he tasted like chocolate and kissed like a dream.

  Not any of that.

  It isn’t that he left me hanging. He’d texted me Sunday morning to let me know he’d be at the salvage yard all day, filling in for his dad, who’d had a rough night of pain. He said he had a call in to the plaster guy, and he’d keep me posted.

  But he hadn’t made any reference at all to what had happened, either.

  I think of calling him, because I am genuinely a little worried for Henry, who tries so hard to act as if he’s not in any pain at all. But if I call to check on Henry, will that seem like I’m really only calling to check on Ben? And anyways, what is Henry to me other than the owner of a business I’ve been frequenting the last few weeks? Would I be crossing a line?

  This kind of thinking—it’s not the way I am, not at all, and I’m frustrated with myself and with Ben, and with everything else that’s been bothering me since Friday. Alex and I shared a mostly silent breakfast on Saturday, except for when he tried to apologize, again, but I was so desperate not to get into it again that I’d put him off. I’d given him a half-hearted tour of the house before he’d headed off to the airport, and in turn he’d asked half-hearted questions as we moved from room to room. But it wasn’t the same, and I feel the pain of our fight as though it’s a bruise on my body. It’s tender and fresh and I’m trying to avoid it with every move I make.

  So I’m up early, headed in to work by six, hoping I can get a couple of hours on the microscope before most of the grad students show up. The walk is good for me—it’s going to be another hot day, but right now it’s cool enough that I can move without sweating. The blooms of the crepe myrtle trees that line my street are fat and heavy with dew, and the air is sweet with the smell of cinnamon rolls from the bakery on the corner.

  Block by block, I let my mind go to the place where I feel safest, to work and the lab, to w
here I can untangle problems I know how to fix.

  By the time I arrive at my basement office, I’m feeling a bit more myself, and it’s at least an hour and a half before I hear signs of life in other parts of the building. I make progress on scanning a couple of my samples, but soon enough, it becomes a busy morning—I help Akeelah with her sample preparation, and Todd, playing to type, refuses my offer of help in positioning the beam on the microscope for his initial scan, but then fucks it up and has to ask for me to fix it anyway. I meet with Dr. Harroway, who was my professor in Intro to Non-Ferrous Metals when I was a graduate student, and show him a new animation I did one night last week for explaining crystal structure to undergrads. He’s so thrilled that he asks me to come do a lecture to his class this fall.

  I’m eating lunch in my office when Dr. Singh knocks softly, his manner always so gentle and tentative that I sometimes wonder how he has managed to survive in this field, let alone how he’s managed to become one of its most respected scholars. He seems entirely comfortable in the background of things, and I think this is why I find it so easy to work with him.

  I move a stack of papers from the extra chair I have and invite him to sit. When I first started working here, only two weeks after I’d graduated, I’d struggled to talk to Dr. Singh in any other way than progress reports—as his student, I’d always felt compelled to tell him how far along I was on my experiments, on my thesis. As his colleague, I frequently found myself doing the same, giving him an account of how I’d spent my day. He’d listen patiently until I finished, but then he’d just go straight into what he’d sought me out for in the first place—usually to tell me about a meeting or to ask a question about the microscope—without acknowledging my rambling. Eventually, I got used to the idea that he wasn’t checking up on me.

  “I have good news,” he says, a faint look of displeasure crossing his face as he tries to get comfortable in the chair. It’s not going to happen since that thing looks as if it came from an elementary school classroom in the 1980s, but Dr. Singh would never complain. “We heard back from the Journal of Applied Metallurgy today. With some slight adjustments, they want to publish our paper.”

  He says this with the same measured tone that he says everything, but this news is big, and we both know it, so we’re sort of dumbly smiling at each other across my desk. We worked for years on this paper, having started it in my final year of the master’s program. It has data from some of my most successful work on the microscope, data that I was hoping to save for this kind of publication. I’m so excited that I clasp my hands together in pride, squeezing them tightly to prevent an outburst of actual applause. “Congratulations,” I say, and Dr. Singh shakes his head, his smile dimming.

  “The congratulations go to you.” He’s clearing his throat, shifting his eyes downward.

  Shit, I think, anticipating what’s coming. This is the worst part about academic publishing, that you’re going to get asked to change your work so much that it won’t even resemble what you’d originally done, that you’d have to sell out your work to get the publication credit. For me, this isn’t such a big deal—I’m not faculty, and it doesn’t really matter to me or my bosses whether I get publications, so I can tell journals to stuff it if I want. I’d be disappointed, but I’d try again with another journal. Dr. Singh, though, is going up for promotion next year, and his case will be a slam dunk if he gets this publication in this particular journal—going somewhere else could take months. “What kind of changes do they want?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer.

  “Very minor,” he says, and then repeats it with emphasis, as if to convince me. “It’s actually more that—that I’d want to make a change.”

  “Oh?” I’m confused. Dr. Singh has been happy with every draft of the paper I’ve given him. On the last draft, he’d not made a single change, a fact that had filled me with giddy pride.

  “I want to make you primary author on the paper.”

  My face goes immediately hot, the same feeling you get when you’ve narrowly missed some kind of disaster, a car wreck or a nasty fall. I’ve never been first author on a publication, and it’s rare for someone in my position to have that kind of professional credit. I say the first thing that comes to mind. “No. No, that’s—that’s really okay.”

  Dr. Singh leans forward, tapping his hand on my desk. “Ekaterina,” he says, and now I really do feel like his student again—the way he says my name is an admonishment. “You cannot turn this down. Aside from it being short-sighted for you do so, in professional terms, I am actually insisting that the change be made.”

  “But I’ve explained,” I say, and I hear that my voice has gone a little high, a little desperate. “I’m not looking for other professional opportunities. I’m very happy to be where I am. This position suits me. This is what I want.” I look away from his skeptical expression. “The first author thing—it doesn’t matter to me. At all.”

  “Everything in this paper is your work. All of the data. You’ve written it. Yes, I provided the equipment, and yes, the funding came from my group, but this is your work. It may not matter to you, but it matters to me that I not overstate my contribution.”

  The hands that I had clasped in celebration before—I’m wringing them now, and I make a conscious effort to stop, setting them in my lap. I want to seem in control here, but I feel panicky and startled, unprepared for this confrontation.

  He seems to recognize my discomfort, and takes a deep breath before continuing. “You know very well, Ekaterina, that your work is more sophisticated than every postdoc we have here. It’s more sophisticated than some of our faculty’s. I know you have your own reasons for staying in this position when you could be doing more, and I certainly benefit from whatever keeps you here. But you were my student, and perhaps you are too comfortable standing behind me, rather than out front, on your own.”

  “That’s not it…” I begin, but he holds up a hand to stop me.

  “Maybe not. What keeps you from doing more is not my business. But what is my business is how this article sees the light of day. I’m not comfortable being lead author on a paper that I’m not responsible for.”

  Someone else might hear this from Dr. Singh and wonder whether there’s some kind of embarrassment about the work, some concern that it’s not good enough to have his name attached to it. But this isn’t it, and I know it—my work is solid, the data precise, the writing strong. I may be doing a job that I’m overqualified for, but that doesn’t mean I underestimate my own talent or capability.

  “If you have my permission, though,” I say, quietly, not sure how I want to finish the thought.

  “We have a week,” he says, standing from his chair, “to reply to their acceptance letter. You let me know if you accept my terms. If not, I’ll decline their offer to publish the article.”

  He gives a nod, almost a slight little bow, one of many gentlemanly relics Dr. Singh has, before leaving my office, his soft steps fading down the hall.

  Lunch seems entirely unappetizing at this point, even the small piece of cake I packed as a treat for myself. I hate that Dr. Singh has changed the rules on me, that he tells me now—when the paper is only a step or two away from publication in such a prestigious journal—about stepping down as lead author.

  I feel duped, angry.

  But as I move through the rest of my workday, setting up scans for two grad students in Harroway’s group, ordering a part for the SEM, running a diagnostic on one of the older scopes we’re trying to keep online, I realize I’m less angry at Dr. Singh than I am at the very idea that he brought up, that I could be doing so much more. This is what Ben has said to me almost every time he’s tried to sell me on Beaumont, that I’m wasting my talent, that I have no vision. And this is basically what Alex said to me too—staying in one place, everything easy.

  By the time I’m ready to call it a day, I’m doing that thing where you too
aggressively pack your bag, too thunderously go up the stairs, too forcefully open the door. I’m fucking pissed, actually. Who are these men, anyways, to tell me what I should be doing, what my talent is good for, what’s easy? Who are these men to say that I have to live a life where work takes over, where I’m always worried about the next thing? Who are these men who think having vision means making money, making things? And who are these fucking men to tell me what’s easy? What’s easy about becoming a part of a community, about reading the local paper every week, making sure you try something new, even if it’s scary and you have to go by yourself? What’s easy about making best friends, about forming relationships that are going to last, when someone has your back and you have theirs? What’s easy about trying to make a home for yourself, when you’ve never had one before?

  I don’t notice anything on my walk home, don’t feel the oppressive heat of the early evening, don’t even bother to wipe the sweat that I feel trace down my jaw. I don’t do anything but march toward my house, feeling righteous and defensive and ready to unleash all my anger on the next person who does me wrong.

  And lucky for me, there’s Ben sitting on my front stoop, waiting.

  * * * *

  I’m a nightmare when I’m in this kind of mood, and I know it. I’m alternatively quiet and remote, making everyone around me feel responsible for some unspoken error, or I’m quick to lash out, touchy and argumentative. But as soon as I draw close to Ben, as soon as I see the way his big, rangy body takes up space, the way his hands are loosely clasped between his spread knees, the evening stubble on his jaw—some of the fight goes out of me, so I stop in front of him, managing a grudging, “Hi.” Even if the things Ben has said to me over the past few weeks are part of why I’m mad, I know it has nothing to do with what happened today with Dr. Singh.